The Work of Forgetting: Slavery and the 'Portuguese Burghers' of Sri Lanka

• Department of History

Nira Wickramasinghe (University of Leiden) will give a talk in the framework of the HEC Colloquia hosted by the EUI Department of History.

Why did slave ancestry fade away in many parts of the Indian Ocean world, while propelling collective memories of descendants in Atlantic and Caribbean territories? Why and how does forgetting rather than memory become the basis of belonging and selfhood?

In the Indian Ocean world, scattered communities as the Cape Coloureds, gens de couleurs libres (Mauritius), Belanda Depok (Depok), Mardijkers (Tugu), Orang Borgo (Minahasa) and Portuguese Burghers (Sri Lanka) emerged, often as forcefully ascribed identity-based groups, but sharing veiled cognitive, moral, and emotional connections to a past of slavery. While forgetting and remembering of enslaved ancestries took contrasting routes, from the start of the Dutch slave trade in the seventeenth century throughout the abolitionist waves of the nineteenth century, slave ancestry in Indian Ocean territories faded as a dominant identity marker with forms of belonging on 'racial', religious, caste and class lines in constant flux. Probing the making of a community described as 'Portuguese Burghers' in Sri Lanka over the 16th-19th centuries will provide a possible prism to understand histories of loss and retention. This paper will look at the emergence of fragmented social formations and the idea of mixedness during the Portuguese colonial control of the island. It will then examine some of the procedures followed by people of enslaved lineage to 'become local' over the ensuing centuries of Dutch and British rule on the island. Finally it will show how racialisation became entrenched while borders of 'race' appeared, disappeared and moved to create a 'Portuguese Burgher' community that was distinct from the more 'respectable' Dutch Burghers.